This week I’m doing a redux of my original Sub-Surface Scattering Monday Movie. The footage is clearer, and we’re taking a deep dive into how you can get started using the fast skin materials in 3dsMax and mental ray. Next week, we’ll be taking a look at the Sub-Surface Scattering Physical Material!

Enjoy!

This week we’re looking at how you can use the default 3dsMax Ink & Paint material to create a simple sketch effect in your renders.  It works best for inorganic scenes like the thumbnail I’ve shown here.  It’s a natural extension of last week’s video where we looked at how you can really juice 3dsMax beyond simply creating scenes and rendering them.

This week I’m providing a quick tutorial on how you can use backgrounds in 3dsMax. I know that 90% of users already know how to add an image background to a scene. However, I’ll also be covering how you can display the background in the viewport as well as a few of the more robust uses for 3d Studio Max backgrounds. Many users don’t think outside the box when it comes to putting your scene into a context, so this’ll put you a little ahead of the curve.

This week I made an entry for 3dTotal’s Speed Modeling Challenge.  This week’s topic was creating a television, so I made a nice 1950′s wooden mini TV.  I recorded myself modeling and setting up the render, but CamStudio dropped it, so instead I did this overview.  I’ll walk you through the model in 3dsMax, including some tips on how I set up the render in mental ray.

Sorry about the delay this week; it’s a holiday in the USA, so I took it.  This week we’re looking at how you can easily replicate molding around the top of an old building in 3dsMax.  It’s a simple technique using splines, extrusion, and some cubes.  You’ll find that modeling molding is surprisingly easy!

I’ve been a little off the radar lately- just got done with a road trip. On the bright side, I’m refreshed after the vacation, and ready to bring you another Monday Movie! This week, we’re looking at 3 more techniques for reducing your render times in 3d Studio Max. These aren’t quite as universally applicable as last weeks, but they can still save you a lot of time when the circumstances are right. We’ll be addressing:

• polygon counts,
• precomputed lighting, and
• advanced material substitution.

You’d be surprised how much time you can save by reducing render times, so this movie will give you even more ways of speeding up your throughput!

This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can lower your render times in 3d Studio Max. Optimizing renders is a critical skill that hasn’t been very mainstream, even though it’s still important. We’re going to look at four of seven techniques:

1. Changing the render size,
2. Rendering areas,
3. Changing lighting parameters, and
4. Lowering render sampling.

We’ll be taking this render from 25 seconds down to 7 seconds without big changes in quality.  Knowing where you can shave time off of renders is crucial to your productivity and to speeding up your learning.

This week we’ll be looking at a common problem you’ll run into when modeling and animating in 3d Studio Max. When you apply a transformation to an object, a lot of the time 3dsMax won’t actually modify the object so much as add a “phantom” modifier to the stack. This can have some serious consequences when you change the pivot of your object (or worse, when an animation constraint does it for you).  It’s often called object skewing, or object slanting.  It’s where your model gets distorted when you move, rotate, or scale it.  In this Monday Movie, I’ll show you how to recognize the problem, fix it if it comes up, and prevent it from ever happening again.

Sorry for the incredible wait in getting this Monday Movie uploaded.  YouTube was down for a while, and my original encoding crashed so I had to do it twice.

This week we’re looking at how you can use 3d Studio Max Ambient Occlusion either on its own or as part of a mix map.  It’s a quick and easy way to add some shadowing directly to your model, and helps make your details pop.  I’ll cover some of the parameters of the Ambient Occlusion map (which I don’t think I’ve done in detail in the past).  I’ll also demonstrate how to use ambient occlusion as a mix controller to blend two other maps (or materials) together.

1. position them manually using the 3dsMax gizmos,
2. use the Normal Align tool,
3. use the Array tool, or
4. if the situation is really complicated, you can use the Spacing tool.

I go through all of these tools in this week’s Monday Movie.  As always, be sure to leave comments on the post.  Let me know if there’s anything that you’d like me to change about the format, or if you have questions that you’d like answered in the form of a video!

We’ve got a great episode for you this week.  We’ll be talking about procedural modeling, an old technique modelers used to use before the days of Zbrush and Mudbox.  Using the Vertex Paint Modifier in 3d Studio Max, we can paint masks directly onto the surface of an object, and then use that as a mix map for blending displacement maps.  This is an awesome technique for making small touchups to characters, or layering on complex displacement maps to create incredibly detailed modeling!

On a side note, I’ve finally mastered the art of a crisp upload to YouTube.  I should probably make a Monday Movie about making my Monday Movies!  How meta!

Sorry this Monday Movie is being uploaded at the end of the day.  I’ve been busy with work, and now another side project is eating up my time.  This week’s topic is about the ShapeMerge tool in 3dsMax.  ShapeMerge allows you to use a spline object to cut shapes out of mesh objects along the z axis.  While this might sound complex, it’s actually a powerful and robust tool that can compliment both an organic and inorganic pipeline.

This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can use the LookAt constraint and the Path constraint to make objects follow each other in a “piston” like fashion.  This is useful for mechanical rigs like hydraulics or characters. You can use this technique, and others like it, to create 3d characters that have their subtle animations (like moving parts) delegated away to constraints so that you can focus on the more important keyframes like positions!